Sabre Operations Platform Cleared for takeoff

Every year billions of passengers rely on the airline industry to connect them to their destination, whether it’s to visit loved ones, for a business meeting or for a vacation. In 2019 alone, it is expected there will be around 4.6 billion passengers, flying on over 39 million flights. We often take flying for granted, only really stopping to think about it when things don’t go to plan. Imagine the complexity that goes on behind the scenes every day to get each passenger from the check-in desk to their destination. Just think about the hundreds of check-in and gate agents that are ready to help you, and the thousands of pilots and flight attendants that are always ready and prepared to greet you as you board the plane. Imagine what it takes to coordinate these staff members all around the world to be in the right place at the right time – not to mention the aircraft itself!

The Sabre Operations Platform is a key piece of Sabre’s overall portfolio, working in tandem with Sabre’s Commercial Platform and the Data & Analytics ecosystem to give airlines the technology necessary to achieve their plans and exceed customer expectations. Inside the platform, operational solutions manage extreme complexity and come together as the industry’s only platform offering end-to-end operations management. Across Crew Management, Movement Management, Flight Management

Crew Management

Optimize crew schedules to increase productivity Empower crew members with self-service tools Recover crew schedules faster during disruption Minimize time spent on regulatory rule changes

Flight Management

Reduce operating costs Increase safety and improve passenger experience Streamline decision making across the portfolio Maximize efficiency with improved workflows down – it predicts that the global fleet size will double over the next 20 years, resulting in an estimated 35,000 new aircraft. With that growth comes the corresponding increase in crew size, an estimated uptick of two to three times of today’s total, meaning an expected 839,000 more crew over 20 years. This increase in fleet and crew volumes will amplify the already challenging level of operating and services costs which currently equates to 73% of total airline costs. This makes the business of airline operations a high-risk endeavor that has little room for things to go wrong. When you couple this with the growing average load factor on flights and increasingly congested airspace and airport facilities, airlines must prepare for even greater potential impacts on their passengers in times of disruption. Together, these facts are hard to ignore. Savvy airlines need to both execute in the present and begin preparing for the future. Change has been part of the airline industry for many years. However, the pace of change is increasing. As Cam Kenyon, senior vicepresident operations solutions explains, “capacity growth, increasing complexity based on congestion, increasing regulatory oversight, and higher customer expectations are forcing airlines to rethink the way they do business. Sabre is investing now to help airlines navigate this challenging future.”

Key tenets of the Sabre Operations Platform

Over the last few years, Sabre’s Connected Airline approach has increased integration, mobility and simplicity in the operations space.

Building upon this approach, the Sabre Operations Platform looks to embrace the digital world where a closer connection between the Commercial and Operations businesses will give airlines the edge over the competition, providing a holistic approach to planning and service recovery.

Provide complete situational awareness

Enable end-to-end service recovery

Access operational information in real-time Leverage historical data to predict disruptions

Movement Management

Operations Platform Business Areas

Provide situational awareness across airport resources Access real-time information for ground staff Optimize ground staff schedules Empower staff to stay ahead of the passenger Airport Management and Airport Management, the Sabre Operations Platform enables airlines to deliver on their brand promise, reduce operating costs and increase employee satisfaction.

Across an airline’s operation, four business areas are involved in the fulfillment of a flight. The Sabre Operations Platform uniquely manages this entire end-to-end operations process helping airlines reduce cost, increase employee satisfaction and deliver on their brand promise.

An industry not slowing down

These value propositions are especially important when we look at where the industry is heading over the next 20 years. A recent Boeing study shows that the industry is not slowing

Unified

To address the future challenges, the Operations Platform has adopted three new tenets: unified, intelligent and agile. These tenets not only help shape the direction of Sabre’s product development but are the hallmarks of what will set forwardthinking airlines apart.

Airline departments traditionally work in silos and struggle to collaborate, either due to physical location or disparate technology systems. As a unified platform, the Sabre Operations Platform provides a comprehensive operational overview at all times and helps break down these silos. With robust integration between each solution, information can be shared and harnessed to ensure all systems have the latest version of the truth.

Take movement management for example, as one of the core areas of the Operations Platform. It not only shares information between both flight management and crew management solutions, but it also harnesses passenger information from the

Sabre Commercial Platform so that airlines can have complete situational awareness when recovering in times of disruption. Building on this unity between solutions, what-if scenario management on the Operations Platform will allow for unpublished scenarios to be shared between systems to ensure that changes are being made with every team brought into the decision-making process.

The Operations Platform unified approach extends beyond solving department silos in a single airline and helps bring together multiple airlines in some of the more complex operations. The ability for airline groups with multiple airlines to have all their operations on one single platform dramatically reduces operating costs and prevents data silos across airlines and countries. One example of this is ASL Aviation Group, a multi-airline cargo operation with operations across multiple countries in Europe. Fabrice De Biasio, Chief Information Officer, ASL Aviation Group acknowledges the value of the platform for them. The “platform reorganizes our business for [the whole] operation: Flight Operations and Ground Operations. It is very important for us to have one platform for all our airlines”.

Intelligent

In order for airlines to be scalable in this expanding industry, they must start to adopt more intelligent solutions. The Sabre Operations Platform is leveraging intelligent technology to unlock new efficiency through automated decision-making with airline-wide considerations. Too often today, staff are consumed with manual processes – routinely working through check-lists, searching for solutions or struggling to react to issues after they’ve occurred. It’s time to evolve the role and remove the processes that can be automated, freeing up staff to use their knowledge on the important decisions that make the difference.

Utilizing integrated, specialized recovery technology to intelligently manage disruptions, the Operations Platform helps minimize the impact to passengers, crew and staff by taking proactive measures rather than just recovering afterwards. Whether it’s predicting future delays across the whole schedule or utilizing alerts-based recovery technology to provide the best options for individual alerts, the Sabre Operations Platform provides intelligent solutions for decision support.

In the near future, a new Operations Taskboard will bring both of these intelligent solutions together to empower airlines to gain new insights with all operational data streams together in a new intuitive, user-friendly interface. Leveraging the preemptive alerts before a problem or bottleneck arises and focusing on the clear, actionable, high-impact insights rather than getting lost in the whole Gantt chart, increases productivity and allows airlines to scale effectively.

Agile

Legacy operation systems often challenge airlines’ ability to grow and adopt new processes and unique approaches due to little flexibility and control over their own data. Through harnessing new microservices and cloud deployment, the Sabre Operations Platform gives airlines control to achieve their unique strategies and accelerate growth, bringing new flexibility and speed to market. Leveraging the Sabre partnership with Amazon Web Services, the Operations Platform gains performance enhancements, reduces latency and drives business continuity, avoiding down-time with solution migrations or upgrades. With connected enterprise data, airlines can utilize components of the Data & Analytics platform as well as powering the airlines own Operations Data Store.

Another proof point of an agile approach to operations is the focus on mobile-first design and development. Mobile tools enable effective communication and ultimately empower staff and crew with real-time information and the ability to manage their own duties and work-life balance. Flight management mobile solutions provide flight crew with paperless documents and notifications, reducing costs and improving gate turn performance. Integrating with both the flight planning and flight monitoring solutions, airlines streamline decision making across the whole flight portfolio and increase productivity with efficient communications. Crew mobile solutions allows all crew members an easy and efficient way to manage their schedules with configurable notifications, duty acceptance and the ability to exchange duties between crew members, while on the go.

Empowering crew to manage their life outside of the crew room helps increase crew satisfaction, directly impacting passenger experience.

Trusted by airlines globally

Today, the Sabre Operations Platform is trusted by airlines across the entire globe. The platform has proven scalability and is backed by superior performance across the airline community. The platform successfully... .

• tracks over 54 million flights per year

• generates more than 8 million flight plans every year

• supports over 200,000 crew members worldwide Now is not the time to sit still however, and Sabre continues to foster ongoing innovation through collaboration with Sabre Labs, our research and innovation team, and joint ventures with customers. Our regular user workshops help bring together and strengthen the growing community of users, collecting new ideas and solving challenges. Sabre continues to look towards supporting each airline’s unique challenges as the industry evolves and grows over the coming decades. e